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Reprising His Role
As Mayor of Kabul,
Noorzad Has Plans

Beautifying Afghan Capital
Is a Priority Uniquely His;
Nostalgia for the Russians

By

David S. Cloud Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Updated March 3, 2005 12:01 a.m. ET

KABUL, Afghanistan -- After taking office last year, Kabul Mayor Ghulam Sakhi Noorzad combed the municipal building basement, looking for a piece of his past. He found it in an overturned file cabinet, under broken chairs and other refuse.

Inside were old city-planning documents, written in the 1970s by Soviet-bloc engineers, that laid out a master development plan for transforming chaotic Kabul into a gracious capital city of green parks and wide avenues. Mr. Noorzad, a Moscow-trained engineer himself, had begun work on it in 1978, when he was first mayor.

But a Soviet invasion the following year drove him from office and into exile in Toronto. Afghanistan fell into two decades of war and lawlessness, and the plan was forgotten -- except by Mr. Noorzad. Returning to Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion in 2001 toppled the Taliban, he reclaimed his old job, dug out the plan and resumed work on his long-deferred dream.

Now the frayed, dirty, city map, with "Master Plan of Kabul 1978" in Russian, English and the Afghan dialect of Dari written across the top, hangs prominently in his office, just as it did 27 years ago. Asked about the plan recently, the graying 63-year-old mayor jumped up from behind his desk and hurried over to the map.

"It's a perfect plan made by top engineers from Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria and India," Mr. Noorzad explained, ticking off some of the former Soviet satellites and allies who years ago, along with Moscow, sent experts to Kabul to design the new city.

But Kabul has changed a lot since 1978, and Mr. Noorzad's attachment to the Soviet-era master plan has attracted anger, resistance and attempted bribery from residents whose houses and shops he is razing, as well as from Afghan officials who insist his blueprint is badly out of date.

U.S. officials, who have been seeking to instill democracy and capitalism here, admit that they too are a little uncomfortable with the mayor's fondness for Communist-style central planning. "He's a man who believes he had a good plan that he wasn't able to finish," says U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad. "I think we'll be able to work with him, but it's hard to get him off the plan."

The experts who wrote the 1978 plan foresaw correctly that Kabul would undergo explosive population growth, and they came up with what urban planners say is a typically Soviet response: Level large tracts of land to make way for prefabricated apartment buildings and widen the roads to ease the expected increase in traffic.

What they did not foresee was the huge need for basic necessities like shelter and heat that war-torn Kabul would have three decades later. Swaths of south and west Kabul are in ruins. Electricity fails regularly. The city's meandering, cratered roads teem with traffic. Afghans who fled during the 1990s, when warlords frequently shelled Kabul, are flooding back, taking shelter in tent cities and in walled compounds along the city's alley-like side streets.

Beautification hardly seems a priority -- except to Mr. Noorzad. "The only reason I came back is to see our city saved from being a garbage dump," says the mayor, who even indoors wears a qara qali, the peaked wool hat favored by Afghanistan's educated elite.

Last November, Mr. Noorzad told several used-car sellers to vacate prime property along one of the city's main streets. Their shops and lots, he told them, were on city property, along a street that the master plan called for widening.

When the dealers refused to move, he arrived with a bulldozer and leveled their lots. He gave the order to start the destruction while sitting in the back of his ivory Toyota Landcruiser, as the salesmen hurriedly cleared away cars.

"I was so angry, I thought I would go crazy," says salesman Abdul Satar Marzi, who says his father and grandfather before him had sold cars in the same location.

Mayor Noorzad says he was one of the first Afghan students to be sent to Moscow to study road and bridge building in the early 1960s, as part of a massive aid program aimed at turning Kabul into a showplace of Soviet ingenuity.

But he bristles at suggestions that he is now implementing the ideas of the reviled Russians, who he says threw him in jail after invading. "It's not a Russian plan," he snaps.

Other Afghan experts do refer to it as the "Soviet plan." To Afghan engineers trained by the Russians, "this master plan has become their bible," says Najim Azadzoi, an Afghan-born architect now living in the U.S. who is involved in several U.S.-funded reconstruction projects in Afghanistan. "It's easy for them to understand, easy for them to apply."

And it stirs memories of a time when Kabul was hopeful and modernizing, as is gradually happening today. In 1978, Mayor Noorzad says, he escorted Afghanistan's then-president, Mohammad Daoud, on a tour of a two-mile-long stretch of avenue, the first portion of the master plan to be completed.

It ran in front of Kabul's massive, Soviet-built bread factory. He showed off the four-lane avenue lined with imported streetlights and a fenced median strip planted with trees. The president, initially skeptical, was impressed, remarking that the street looked like a "runway for a plane," the mayor recalls. Mr. Daoud, who was killed in the Soviet invasion the following year, ordered Mr. Noorzad to keep going.

Today, the bread factory is still operating, and traffic still moves briskly past it, a rarity in Kabul. But overall, the mayor's showpiece road is a wreck. The streetlights are rusted and broken, the fence is full of gaps, and most of the trees are gone, having been taken for firewood.

Those who oppose the plan are "uninformed," says Mr. Noorzad. He argues that some of Kabul's biggest problems -- traffic and lack of housing -- are exactly the ones that the master plan was meant to address. When the Ministry of Finance refused to fund his projects, he went ahead using municipal funds. He also persuaded the U.S. embassy to donate asphalt to carry out a small road project.

A big difference between Kabul 2005 and Kabul 1978 is that the city's prime property has been carved up by the powerful. When they weren't shelling the capital, warlords and their relatives -- or whoever was in power -- built restaurants and buildings, often on government property, paying bribes to keep authorities quiet.

Memorials to warlords were erected on city traffic circles, and unauthorized cemeteries for their fighters sprang up around the city. The mayor's bulldozers recently plowed through a hillside cemetery, removing some of the grave markers and the green banners denoting mujaheddin tombs. The plots had been built illegally on city land during the 1990s, the mayor says.

Mr. Noorzad says his demolition work is governed by the plan -- not by who offers him bribes. He says that when he told the used-car dealers that they would have to move, they offered to pay him off. When that didn't work, he says, some dealers with family ties to Afghan warlords warned there might be violence if he tried to move them.

Mr. Marzi, the car dealer, says he is a cousin of onetime warlord Marshall Fahim and denies knowing about any threats of violence. But he confirmed that the car dealers offered the mayor money to let them stay, which both sides say he rebuffed -- and that he bulldozed their shops anyway.

After the demolition, the mayor took them to the bleak outskirts of Kabul, miles from the city center. He told the dealers he would give them the land. "He told us, 'This is the best place for you because it's not in the master plan,' " Mr. Marzi says.